As David pointed out in his blog post about our parks program, we created some fundraising campaigns in 2010 and 2011 to help illustrate the need to protect the digital spaces we enjoy as well as the physical marvels of nature around the world. Inspired by the program created by Mozilla Japan for Firefox 3.5, Shiretoko, we realized we had a way to explain our mission in a way that a broader audience could understand.

We started in 2010 by partnering with the Madagascar Fauna Group, whose mission was to protect lemur habitats by discouraging deforestation and encouraging education on the island nation of Madagascar. We chose this group because Firefox 3.6 was code named Namoroka for a park in the north of Madagascar. The Mozilla community came together and raised almost $12,000.

The next parks project was for Thunderbird 3.0, which had been codenamed Lanikai after one of the world’s most beautiful beaches in Hawaii. For this campaign we partnered with Kupu, a local not-for-profit that meshes conservation of engandered sea birds with providing educational and career opportunities for at-risk youth. Again, the Mozilla community came through, raising more than $7,000 to help them use digital tecnology to support their mission.

Our last parks campaign in 2011 was with World Wildlife Fund. Firefox 4 was code named Tumucumaque for the world’s largest rainforest park in the north of Brazil. The park is bigger than belgium and the biodiversity of its ecosystem is like nowhere else on earth. This campaign was focused on raising funds to help the WWF protect this park in Brazil, protecing speices like the Jaguar. The Mozilla community raised over $13,000. We really do rock. In addition to the fundraising campaign, Mozilla Japan created the Virtual Park demo, demonstrating the how we all create a diverse digital ecosystem with cool jungle graphics.

In all the campaigns we were able to use our considerable reach to help different not-for-profits around the world. Donations came in primarily from the US and Canada (the campaigns weren’t localized sadly), but people all over the world contributed to help these causes.

We also got some amazing feedback from our users on the program. Many people contacted us to thank us for doing good, happy to see Mozilla getting involved in conservation efforts. Even a gradeschool teacher in the United States used our lemur campaign to teach her students about Madagasar and the animals that live there.